Review: Gravity Falls – “A Tale of Two Stans”

Spoilers Below

When we left the gang way back in March, Grunkle Stan has opened the portal in the basement of the Mystery Shack. His twin brother, also named Stan, surprised everyone by stepping out of the portal.

Almost all of this episode is a flashback. Everyone in Gravity Falls thought Stan was Stanford. However, that is his brother’s name. “Our” Stan is Stanley. Yes, their names are Stanley and Stanford. They were best friends as kids. Stanford, known as Ford, was a genius with a rare disorder that gave him six fingers on each hand. Stanley, on the other hand, was a delinquent that often cheated off of his brother’s papers. Considered strange by other kids their age, the boys only had each other as friends.

During one of their childhood adventures, they found an abandoned ship. They called it “Stan-O-War.” They promised that they would fix up the ship and sail around the world together.

In high school, Ford built a perpetual motion machine for the school science fair. The school principal told Ford and his parents that recruiters from a prestigious college wanted to see his machine. Stan, sitting outside the principal’s office, overheard the conversation. Upset about the prospect of being separated from his twin, Stan accidentally destroys the machine. When the recruiters find a broken machine the next day, they cross his name off the list of potential applicants. Ford finds an empty bag of Stan’s favorite snacks near the machine and he knows exactly what happened.

Angered by Stan’s selfishness, their parents throw Stan out of the house. Stan travels around the country as a sleazy salesman, getting banned from almost every state he sets foot in. Meanwhile, Ford ends up going to a second rate college, where he has to work twice as hard to reach his goal.

Once he reached the end of his studies, Ford decides to go to Gravity Falls, Oregon to study the unusual phenomenon. He recruits his college buddy, Fiddleford Hadron McGucket, to help him build a machine that will find out where these phenomena originated.

During their trial run, McGucket gets partially pulled into the portal. Thankfully, Ford is able to pull him back to our dimension. However, the event scared McGucket enough to make him quit the project. Freaked out himself, Ford hides each of the journals that detail how the portal machine works. He calls his twin brother to take the last (well, the first) journal far, far away. Stan and Ford fight. Stan is angry that Ford only wants to send him away again, while Ford wants to protect the world from the other dimension.

In the midst of the fight, Stan leans against a hot panel, which creates a brand on his back. The men accidentally turn the machine on again and Ford is sucked into the portal.

Stan, hungry and depressed, wandered into town to buy a loaf of bread. The locals think that he is the weird scientist that lives in the forest. At that point, Stan decides to take on his brother’s name and open his house as the Mystery Shack. During the day, he runs the Shack as Mr. Mystery, generating enough revenue to pay his brother’s mortgage, but at night he tries to get the portal working again to bring back his brother.

Back in the present, Ford agrees to let Stan and the kids stay at the Shack for the rest of the summer. But once summer is over, Stan needs to give Ford back his name and his house and get out. In exchange, Stan refuses to let Ford near the kids. Mabel and Dipper overhear their great uncles arguing and go to bed worrying that is what they will turn into when they grow up.

I have mixed feelings about this episode. While I loved getting the backstory between the two Stans, it felt like the episode dragged a bit. Perhaps it’s because the episode was commercial free. There weren’t any breaks to give us a bit of a breather from the constant story. There was a lot of information to cover but maybe it could have been broken out over a couple of episodes. Then again, maybe the episode didn’t feel as fun because the story almost completely revolved around Stan and Ford. There wasn’t a lot of comedy to lighten the mood, just straight up twin drama. We did get a little bit of comedy from Soos during the end credits but it really made me miss Mabel’s hijinks. I hope this isn’t setting the tone for the rest of the season.